Simon Greer
Image by Getty Images
Simon Greer would like to be known as the man who took down the provocative political commentator Glenn Beck.
As the president and CEO of Jewish Funds for Justice, Greer led a campaign to get Beck booted from his Fox News show over Beck’s allegedly anti-Semitic rhetoric and his invocations of the Holocaust. In a newspaper advertisement signed by 400 rabbis, Greer’s group called Beck out for alleging that Jewish billionaire George Soros, a funder of progressive causes, had helped “send the Jews to the death camps” while a child during the Nazi era in Eastern Europe.
By the time Fox News and Beck parted ways in June, Greer had emerged as a sort of Abe Foxman of the Jewish progressive sphere, a spokesman and moralizer for the Jewish left.
Now Greer, 43, has been tapped to take the lead of the most powerful Jewish social justice group. As head of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, Greer will not only control the purse strings of the most significant funder of the Jewish left. He will also be responsible for the foundation’s Jewish Social Justice Roundtable, an umbrella organization of 18 Jewish social justice agencies that has become increasingly important. In July, members of the roundtable were invited to the White House for a series of policy briefings.
Greer is leaving Jewish Funds for Justice after six years in which the organization has grown significantly, most recently merging with the California-based Progressive Jewish Alliance.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
